.concat()

SalzburgMarch 3, 2018

the web development and UX conference in Austria

Let's get together

to share knowledge across programming-languages and cultures to learn new things and have fun.

It's all about the People

We invite the web development and UX community from Austria and the entire world to Salzburg. Have a brilliant and safe conference where you can meet old and new friends to expand your knowledge and horizon.

Check out .concat() 2015 to get a feeling of how cozy this conf will be 😍

The Web & UX

Come and hear talks about the wide variety of web and UX topics and its community so you can build better applications for more platforms, devices and humans. Yes – the web and its UX is definitely a great place to be in.

The Venue

We're hosted by the University of Applied Sciences in Salzburg. Not only do they have a modern building that makes for a productive, yet comfortable environment to learn, but high-quality courses with a dedicated web focus.

Salzburg

has lots more to offer than Mozart.

It is home to a vibrant web development community, fueled by an incredible amount of talent the University brings forth. More and more creative agencies and startups come up here and there is also an amazing coworkingspace, monthly meetups and a Barcamp.

Party 🎉 9 PM

Studio 68 & MARK Salzburg

End of.concat()2018

Accessibility and Inclusion

Our main goal to have an inclusive event with a welcoming atmosphere.

There are a great number of accessibility issues that can hinder people from attending an event. As it is our main goal to have an inclusive event with a welcoming atmosphere, we are trying hard to remove these barriers. If there is something that keeps you away from this conference please get in touch with us so we can work this out.

The lounge and one track are on the ground-floor. No steps required.

The second track is on the first floor, accessible with two elevators. In this room only the last row is accessible without steps.

In case it is not immediately clear, whether you can attend due to accessibility issues, we will happily reserve you a ticket.

Code of Conduct

Our goal is to have an awesome and inclusive community-driven conference where people meet, hang out together, chat, listen to talks, exchange ideas and make new friends. Any harmful or discriminating behaviour will not be tolerated and results in the offending person being expelled from the conference.

Sweets Sponsor

Manner Schnitten

Drinks Sponsor

Makava

Food Truck Sponsor

Snacks & Drinks

The Team

Meet the people behind .concat()

Neele Barthel

Lisi Linhart

Hannes Moser

Diversity Team

Bokan M. Assad

Jackie / Andrea Ida Malkah Klaura

Katta Spiel

The University of Applied Sciences in Salzburg combines academic studies with practical skills. We use current technologies and challenges from web development to teach the important concepts of computer science on both an undergraduate and graduate level.

When Fast is Faster Than Fastest

Excellent real-world JavaScript performance for the web — both in the browser and server-side with Node.js — has never been more important. Over the last few years, the V8 team has learned that optimizing for the real world is different than optimizing for synthetic benchmarks. The key lesson? Consistent, good baseline performance across the entire JavaScript language is the central ingredient to a fast web. In this talk, we’ll discuss how V8’s new compilation pipeline using Ignition and TurboFan enables good baseline performance, and better yet, we’ll demonstrate how using the full expressiveness of the JavaScript language in your applications can lead to faster code.

Daniel Clifford

Daniel leads the team at Google working on the V8 virtual machine for JavaScript and WebAssembly. Previous to joining Google in 2010, he worked on diverse language runtimes, from an embedded JVM for set-top boxes to the first version of Apple's AppleScript runtime. He was born in California but has been an expat-in-training for almost two decades living with his family in Munich, Germany. Daniel has a BS degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Remote device sign-in – Authenticating without a keyboard

When we were developing our SoundCloud app for Xbox One, something became very obvious during usability testing: signing in with a game controller really sucks. Entering text requires navigating a virtual keyboard to individual letters, numbers, and characters one at a time – such a nightmare! Other connected devices are even more extreme, with no way to enter text at all. Learn how to implement what we call “remote device sign-in”, a way for people to sign in to devices with limited input capability that is secure, simple, and fast.

Tiffany Conroy

Tiffany is a Canadian living in Berlin. She is a senior product manager and engineer at SoundCloud. Her specialty is picking apart nuanced user needs and translating them into nitty gritty technical requirements. She gives talks at the intersection of UX and dev.

Thinking PRPL

The mobile web is SLOW. We’ve become accustomed to developing large and complex applications with powerful desktop and laptop machines. 73% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that was too slow to load [1]. The world of front end development is evolving continuously with more client-side heavy applications and with this, bundle sizes for many JS frameworks can be huge [2] [3]. This can significantly affect loading times, especially on a mobile device with a poor connection.

This talk will cover the concept behind the PRPL pattern, what it is and how you can use it to build a fast and reliable progressive single-page application.

We’ll talk about how you can:

Push the most important resources first

Render your initial route as soon as possible

Pre-cache resources for all your routes using a Service Worker

Lazy load your remaining routes so that they load on demand

[1] How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line (https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/)

Houssein Djirdeh

Houssein does JavaScript at Rangle.io focusing on both web and mobile development. In his spare time, he enjoys contributing talks and technical writing to the development community. On the rare occasions when Houssein is not working on a blog post or a open source project, he enjoys weightlifting and watching far too much YouTube.

Let's save the internet: How to make browsers compatible with the web

During the browser wars, compatibility was a mess and so was the web. Dirty hacks, a huge pile of frustration and enormous amount of time to test through every browser were a part of our everyday life. Times changed. Browser wars are finally over (right?!). But the web is still broken and browsers still work in different ways. In this talk, we’ll explore the reason for web (in)compatibility, how to fix it and how you as wompats can help to save the world (wide web).

Ola Gasidlo

Ola loves speaking at conferences and meetups. She either speaks about offline first, progressive enhancement with a focus on network or web compatibility, what it's about and why it matters. She also loves to make tough tech topics understandable to everyone and enable people. Also, Ola was MC at RejectJS, 3 years in a row and otsconf.

Community is very dear to her heart as well as Open Source. This is why Ola is one of the co-founders of the OpenTechSchool Dortmund, co-organizer of RejectJS, part of CSSConfEU and creator of otsconf. Also huge supporter of the JavaScript community, diversity in tech and daugher driven development.

Why a poker playing AI should have designers looking for a new job

A 2013 report called 'The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?' left some occupations like soccer umpires feeling very vulnerable, and designers feeling very smug. However as a weird mix of content strategist, UX designer and former poker player my smug job-secure world was thrown upside down by the success of the Libratus poker AI in January of this year - the first to comprehensively beat multiple poker professionals over a series of four days.

If you’re wondering what poker has to do with design - the answer is a lot! In this talk I’ll cover why the mix of probability, pattern-matching, human behaviour and context in poker strategy is a good model for design, how game theory in poker strategy might be used to ‘solve’ design (and possibly front-end dev!), where design AI efforts are at, and why we should stop treating AI like a digital butler and start imagining the tools of the future - even it if puts you out of a job.

Cory-Ann Joseph

Cory started working with the internet way back in 2001 when she chanced her way into a position as web content editor for the Aussie version of the X-Games. Since then she's dabbled in PR, marketing, events management, a skateboard shop, worked as a barista, accrued a blank IMDB profile, run pub poker tournaments in rural NSW, and dropped out of Bible college - amongst other things. Cory recently returned to Melbourne from Dublin, where she managed design teams at Paddy Power and Mobile Travel Technologies. She’s currently working as a UX Lead at ANZ.

Webpack - The Good Parts

In this high-level overview you'll learn how to configure Webpack. Even if you know it already, there might be some surprises in store as you gain insight to the tool you otherwise might miss.

Tobias Koppers

Tobias Koppers is the founder of webpack. He works full time as core developer on webpack.

PHP in 2018

For many in the PHP community 2016 and 2017 was all about getting onto PHP 7. The drastic performance improvements and overall efficiency has resulted in PHP 7 adoption rates well beyond past PHP versions. If you are not on PHP 7 yet, you will learn why you should be, but the talk will focus more on new features in PHP 7.2 and 7.3 along with optimization and static analysis.

Rasmus Lerdorf

Rasmus Lerdorf is known for having gotten the PHP project off the ground in 1995 and has contributed to a number of other open source projects over the years. He was an infrastructure architect at Yahoo! for more than 7 years and joined Etsy in 2012. He was born in Greenland, grew up in Denmark and Canada and has a Systems Design engineering degree from the University of Waterloo.

Live and let die: Untangling the web of objects

Browsers these days are more than just simple renderers for web content. They bundle all sorts of fundamental infrastructure and increasingly offer functionality traditionally found only in operating systems. For example, Chrome ships with a sandbox for privileged execution, a JavaScript virtual machine for executing user code, a scheduler, a rendering engine, a network stack, and much, much more. In this talk we will go on a journey to explore two of those components: the V8 JavaScript virtual machine and how it is connected to the Blink rendering engine. More specifically, we will have a look at how JavaScript connects to the DOM and how objects live and die together. The takeaway? Appreciation for the abstractions that browsers and the web platform provide.

Michael Lippautz

Michael is a Senior Software Engineer at Google working on the V8 virtual machine for JavaScript and the Chromium project that provides the platform for the Chrome browser and Chrome OS. Before joining Google full-time he worked on the Dart virtual machine. He was born in Austria and received a Ph.D. in 2015 for his work in the area of scalable concurrent systems from the University of Salzburg.

Bringing GraphQL to the Enterprise: When IBM Met Apollo

In a micro-service architecture, managing API surfaces can get out of control in a hurry. On bigger teams, utter chaos is just one breaking change away.

In this talk, we'll take a look at how one of the largest tech companies in the world is leveraging GraphQL to unify dozens of independent REST APIs into a single, explorable data layer — all while seeing HUGE (~2.5x) performance gains. Take a peek under the hood of our codebase and learn how GraphQL can help you create a better, more reliable platform, which will improve the experience for both the people using the platform AND the people building it.

Ryan Mackey

Ryan is a web developer from Colorado who now hangs his hat in Austin, Texas. When he's not hunched over a laptop, downing black coffee, he enjoys playing his guitar while trying to finish Netflix.

Your algorithm isn't neutral: exclusionary UX and how to avoid it

We all have biases, and the tech we build is a reflection of us; we need to be aware of the exclusionary effects of dev and UX decisions. This talk is about how our biases are reflected in the software we build — with practical examples, and how to combat them. Software can exclude those who need our products the most. We will learn to: (1) recognize exclusionary design and development patterns, (2) identify the decision points which lead to them, the information we ask of our users, and how we use that information, and (3) combat bias, and when to leave the product-building to someone else.

Ivana McConnell

Ivana is a UI/UX designer. She fell in love with the web on Geocities and Neopets many years ago, and found her way into UX design via neuroscience research, rock climbing instruction, and video game testing. Originally born in Sarajevo, she has lived in Croatia, all over Canada, and Scotland, and is now based in Vancouver working remotely for Customer.io.

The strategy guide to CSS Custom Properties

Static variables are not always global, but global variables are almost always static, therefore dynamic variables should always be local. Did that make sense to you? If not you need to see my talk.

CSS custom properties are very different from variables in preprocessors like Sass. They could fundamentally change how we write CSS. When used incorrectly they can make CSS more complex. Learn how to avoid this and get the most out of CSS custom properties.

Mike Riethmuller

Mike is an independent web developer from Australia who has worked on some of Australia’s largest websites as well as some of the smallest community sites. When he’s not building websites or writing about building websites, he likes to experiment with code. Mike loves learning new things and finding techniques that challenge what we think is best practice. When he’s not exploring the digital landscape, he likes to explore the world. Currently trying to find a way to do both those things at the same time.

Designing Great Progressive Web Apps

Designing web apps is now more challenging than ever. With their potential ability to behave like native apps, PWAs have a more intimate user experience, they’re more responsive and much more powerful.

In this talk, you will learn the characteristics of PWAs from a design perspective, and guidelines for designing great PWAs. We will cover topics like app shell, touch guidelines, responsiveness, offline experiences & more.

Nicole Saidy

Nicole is a UI/UX designer with 7+ years of experience. She spends most of her time on the road as digital nomad with a mission to inspire people about design by speaking at conferences, coaching at coding bootcamps, mentoring & writing extensively about her design experience.

When Old Meets New: Codebases

When your codebase has 13 million lines of code, is written in C++/XUL, and dates back to 1998, it may seem like an impossible task to write a modern web app using technologies like React, and tools like Github, while still managing a graceful integration with the existing codebase. Developing new functionality in a legacy codebase which wasn’t originally built for the modern web can introduce a bunch of new and exciting challenges. This talk will categorize the problems of when old code meets new code in three ways: technical and testing challenges, source control and issue tracking challenges, and human and cultural challenges.

At Mozilla, I’m working on a major feature which was developed independently from the rest of the Firefox codebase, and has since been tightly integrated into the rest of the source tree. Along the way we have faced challenges in each of the categories. I will identify some of the pitfalls that developers can run into when trying to merge old and new codebases, and will provide practical advice in avoiding these problems down the road.

Ursula Sarracini

I'm a developer from Toronto, Canada currently working at Mozilla, trying to modernize your newtab page on Firefox. I mostly write in Javascript, but am interested in all the new things going on in the modern web. In my spare time I do yoga, I read a lot of books, I eat a lot of tacos, and I drink a lot of coffee.

Build bridges, not walls – Design for users across cultures

As Internet access expands to the far corners of the world, product makers have the chance to see their work used by millions of people worldwide.

To create products for international users, we must be aware of the full range of human diversity with respect to language, culture and other forms of human difference. If the product doesn't adapt to users' differences, there's a big danger where we think our work is great, but users in other countries finds it terrible, or worse, unusable.

Join this talk to hear how Jenny Shen designed for users in Europe, North- and South America, Asia, and Southeast Asia.

Jenny Shen

Jenny Shen is an independent UX & Product Designer who designs digital products for companies all over the world. She has worked with innovative startups to brands like eBuddy, TravelBird, and Deskbookers. Today, she focuses on the travel tech industry to help shape the future of travel. With her expertise in cross-cultural design and international user research, she also specializes in helping companies expand into new markets. She loves to help tech companies launch and grow their businesses by solving business and user problems.

Psychological safety: How to become a team that learns

As software developers we step into uncharted territory every day. No two projects are alike, we figure out our product on the way, and today's hottest tech is outdated tomorrow. To be successful as a team we need to be able learn from our experiences, all the time.

What makes up an environment that allows people to learn and improve themselves? According to Google and many others, Psychological Safety is the key ingredient. This talk will explain the concept, how to foster this culture as team member or team lead, and how it is a perfect match for Scrum and other Agile methods.

Georg Sorst

Unlocking the power of SVG — SVGs beyond icons and illustrations

Scalable Vector Graphics, or Documents? Both. SVG may be known more as an image format, perfect for displaying icons and illustrations, including animated ones. But there are other aspects of SVG that make it as powerful as it is, and those aspects stem from its nature as a document format, as well as its graphical nature. In this talk, Sara is going to highlight some SVG's document side and show you how it can be leveraged to improve and optimize the way we deliver content such as text and images for the Web, including SVG itself.

Sara Soueidan

Sara Soueidan is a Lebanese freelance front-end web developer working with companies across the globe, building clean, responsive front-ends for Web sites and applications focused on accessibility, progressive enhancement and performance. She also runs workshops on front-end development and writes technical articles on her blog and for various big publications. Sara wrote the Codrops CSS Reference, co-authored the Smashing Book 5, and has been voted the Developer of the Year in the 2015 net awards.

Styled Components

Building user interfaces on the web is hard, because the web, and thus CSS, was inherently made for documents. Because UIs fundamentally are not documents, we've seen a mindset shift towards building component-based system.

The rise of JavaScript frameworks like React, Ember and recently Angular 2, the effort of the W3C to standardize a web-native component system, pattern libraries and styleguides being considered 'the right way to build web applications' and many other things have illuminated this revolution – we are now in the "Component Age".

With that and a few more things in mind, Max along with Glen Maddern (co-creator of css-modules) sat down and started thinking about styling in this new era. They took the best of CSS and the Web to build a new way to style component-based systems. In this talk, Max will describe what they thought about and why they arrived where they did – <💅> styled-components.

Max Stoiber

Max is the technical cofounder of Spectrum.chat, the community platform of the future. He also makes styled-components, react-boilerplate, micro-analytics and a bunch of other open source projects and he co-organises the ReactVienna meetup. He loves to travel, to brew rad coffee and to ski beautiful mountains.

Mathematics of Animation

In the past few years, animations on the web have evolved dramatically. We are able to create animations that generate and manipulate complex geometry, react to user input and tell captivating stories. Behind all of this amazing work is a little bit of Math.

In this session Varun will explore mathematical concepts used for creating reactive and dynamic animations. Focusing on 2D geometry, we’ll dive into topics such as co-ordinate systems, polygons, solving triangles, waves & oscillations. Making these sometimes intimidating concepts accessible to everyone.

Varun Vachhar

Varun Vachhar is a developer with a strong focus on design, interactivity and animation. Originally from New Delhi, he currently lives in Toronto and works as a developer at Rangle.io. In his spare time, he likes to experiment with creative coding and making playful experiences for the web.

Fast. Simple. Accessible.

You already know that accessibility is important. In fact, it’s the law. It’s also a good idea. Let’s make the Web accessible—and faster—for everyone.

We'll skip the “why” and focuses on the “how.” Marking up accessible, performant websites can be as simple as using the right semantic elements in your HTML. Semantic HTML can prevent bugs, improve performance, reduce code bloat, and make your site accessible to screen readers and keyboard users.

Explore accessibility features native to semantic elements and demonstrates how to add additional accessibility with a sprinkling of ARIA roles and attributes. Estelle also covers making accessible form controls, input masking, attractive selects, and creating a fully accessible carousel that functions perfectly with just a few lines of JavaScript—and no frameworks.

Estelle Weyl

Estelle Weyl is a Front End Engineer and Open Web evangelist. Estelle started her professional life in architecture and then managed teen health programs. In 2000, she took the natural step of becoming a web standardista. She has consulted for Kodak Gallery, SurveyMonkey, Samsung, Yahoo, Visa, and Apple, among others. Estelle is the author of Mobile HTML5, CSS Transitions & Animations, and FlexBox in CSS, and co-author of Web Performance Day Book, CSS3: The Definitive Guide, and HTML5 and CSS3 for the Real World, with her books translated into 15 languages. She has spoken at over 100 conferences in over 17 countries. While not coding, Estelle works in construction, de-hippifying her 1960s throwback abode.

Server-Side Swift from Scratch

Server-side Swift is currently in its nascent phase. There are only a handful of frameworks that could be considered usable, and not many websites running on Swift in production. However, we feel there is a lot of promise in server-side Swift.

We will show what a future server-side Swift framework can look like, and how Swift's type-system and the Swift toolchain can provide a state-of-the-art web development experience that in some respects can be even better than what most tools and languages offer today.

The entire codebase for this framework has been open-sourced here http://github.com/pointfreeco, and is currently being used to build the site https://www.pointfree.co, a video series on functional programming and Swift.

Brandon Williams

Brandon did mathematics for a long time, but eventually found himself in tech as a programmer. He lead the iOS and Android teams at Kickstarter for 5.5 years, and eventually open-sourced the entire code bases for both applications. He's interested in functional programming, type systems, and how to better our craft as programmers.

Webpack - The Good Parts

In this high-level overview you'll learn how to configure Webpack. Even if you know it already, there might be some surprises in store as you gain insight to the tool you otherwise might miss.

Juho Vepsäläinen

Juho Vepsäläinen is behind the SurviveJS effort. In addition to being a core developer of Webpack, he has been active in the open source scene since the early 2000s. Blue Arrow Awards winner.

Code of Conduct

tl;dr Don’t be a Jerk. Be excellent.

All attendees, speakers, sponsors and volunteers at .concat() are required to agree with and act according to the following code of conduct. Organizers will enforce this code throughout the event. We are expecting cooperation from all participants to help ensuring a safe environment for everybody.

Need help? Contact us!

The Quick Version

.concat() is dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks, workshops, parties, Twitter and other online media. Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference without a refund at the discretion of the conference organizers.

Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

Sponsors are also subject to the anti-harassment policy. In particular, sponsors should not use sexualized images, activities, or other material. Booth staff (including volunteers) should not use sexualized clothing/uniforms/costumes, or otherwise create a sexualized environment.

If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the conference organizers may take any action they deem appropriate, including warning the offender or expulsion from the conference with no refund.

If you are being harassed, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact a member of conference staff immediately. Conference staff can be identified by a special conference shirt.

In case you can’t find a staff member or want to contact us via email or phone directly, we are always there for you:

Conference staff will be happy to help participants contact hotel / venue security or local law enforcement, provide escorts, or otherwise assist those experiencing harassment to feel safe for the duration of the conference. We value your attendance.

We expect participants to follow these rules at conference and workshop venues and conference-related social events.